Like the Flowing River

r Arrives from Morocco

A visitor arrives from Morocco and tells me a curious story about how certain desert tribes perceive original sin.

Eve was walking in the Garden of Eden when the serpent slithered over to her.

'Eat this apple,' said the serpent.

Eve, who had been properly instructed by God, refused.

'Eat this apple,' insisted the serpent. 'You need to look more beautiful for your man.'

'No, I don't,' replied Eve. 'He has no other woman but me.'

The serpent laughed.

'Of course he has.'

And when Eve did not believe him, he led her up to a well on the top of a hill.

'She's in that cave. Adam hid her in there.'

Eve leaned over and, reflected in the water of the well, she saw a lovely woman. She immediately ate the apple the serpent was holding out to her.

According to this same Moroccan tribe, a return to paradise is guaranteed to anyone who recognizes his or her reflection in the water and feels no fear.

My Funeral

The journalist from The Mail on Sunday appears at my hotel in London and asks one simple question: 'If you were to die today, what kind of funeral would you like?'

The truth is that the idea of death has been with me every day since 1986, when I walked the Road to Santiago. Up until then, I had always been terrified at the thought that, one day, everything would end; but on one of the stages of that pilgrimage, I performed an exercise that consisted in experiencing what it felt like to be buried alive. It was such an intense experience that I lost all fear, and afterwards saw death as my daily companion, who is always by my side, saying: 'I will touch you, but you don't know when. Therefore live life as intensely as you can.'

Because of this, I never leave until tomorrow what I can do or experience today - and that includes joys, work obligations, saying I'm sorry if I feel I've offended someone, and contemplation of the present moment as if it were my last. I can remember many occasions when I have smelled the perfume of death: that far-off day in 1974, in Aterro do Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro), when the taxi I was travelling in was blocked by another car, and a group of armed paramilitaries jumped out and put a hood over my head. Even though they assured me that nothing bad would happen to me, I was convinced that I was about to become another of the military regime's 'disappeared'.

Or when, in August 1989, I got lost on a climb in the Pyrenees. I looked around at the mountains bare of snow and vegetation, thought that I wouldn't have the strength to go back, and concluded that my body would not be found until the following summer. Finally, after wandering around for many hours, I managed to find a track that led me to a remote village.

The journalist from The Mail on Sunday insists: but what would my funeral be like? Well, according to my will, there will be no funeral. I have decided to be cremated, and my wife will scatter my ashes in a place called El Cebrero in Spain - the place where I found my sword. Any unpublished manuscripts and typescripts will remain unpublished (I'm horrified at the number of 'posthumous works' or 'trunks full of papers' that writers' heirs unscrupulously publish in order to make some money; if the authors chose not to publish these things while they were alive, their privacy should be respected). The sword that I found on the Road to Santiago will be thrown into the sea, and thus be returned to the place whence it came. And my money, along with the royalties that will continue to be received for another seventy years, will be devoted entirely to the charitable foundation I have set up.

'And what about your epitaph?' asks the journalist. Well, since I'm going to be cremated, there won't be a headstone on which to write an inscription, since my ashes will have been carried away on the wind. But if I had to choose a phrase, I would choose this: 'He died while he was still alive.' That might seem a contradiction in terms; but I know a lot of people who have stopped living, even though they continue working and eating and carrying on with their usual social activities. They do everything on automatic pilot, unaware of the magic moment that each day brings with it, never stopping to think about the miracle of life, not understanding that the next minute could be their last on the face of this planet.

The journalist leaves, and I sit down at the computer and decide to write this. I know it's not a topic anyone likes to think about, but I have a duty to my readers - to make them think about the important things in life. And death is possibly the most important thing. We are all walking towards death, but we never know when death will touch us and it is our duty, therefore, to look around us, to be grateful for each minute. But we should also be grateful to death, because it makes us think about the importance of each decision we take, or fail to take; it makes us stop doing anything that keeps us stuck in the category of the 'living dead' and, instead, urges us to risk everything, to bet everything on those things we always dreamed of doing, because, whether we like it or not, the angel of death is waiting for us.

Restoring the Web

In New York, I meet up for afternoon tea with a rather unusual artist. She works in a bank in Wall Street, but one day she had a dream, in which she was told to visit twelve different places in the world and, in each one of those places, to create a painting or a sculpture in Nature itself.

So far, she has managed to make four such works. She shows me photos of one of them - a carving of an Indian inside a cave in California. While she waits for further signs to be revealed to her in dreams, she continues working at the bank, and that way earns enough money to travel and to carry out her task.

I ask her why she does it.

'In order to maintain the equilibrium of the world,' she replies. 'It may sound like nonsense, but there is a tenuous web around us all, which we can make stronger or weaker depending on how we behave. We can save or destroy many things with a simple gesture that might, at times, seem utterly pointless. My dreams may be nonsense too, but I don't want to run the risk of not following them. For me, human relationships are like a vast, fragile spider's web. What I'm trying to do with my work is to restore part of that web.'

These Are My Friends

'The reason the king is so powerful is because he's made a pact with the Devil,' a very devout woman in the street told the boy, and he was intrigued.

Some time later, when he was travelling to another town, the boy heard a man beside him remark: 'All this land belongs to the same man. I'd say the Devil had a hand in that.'

Late one summer afternoon, a beautiful woman walked past the boy.